When you are calling a DX as a little whisperer (using 100W in a wire) you need to find the right hole where you must call. Calling together with long yagi antennas at 60 feet owners running a full legal power engine will be a bit frustrating.
Luckily I have an Elecraft P3 which shows me the band traffic so I can identify free spots even in a crowded band.
Here is the spot (in red) where I called (and was heard by VP8STI).
By the way, it is interesting to see the growing number of stations, not listening the DX and endless calling – I still do not understand how they can catch the DX answering to their call if he does it.
VP8STI (green bar) was sending 599 in the picture below.
Ok, now you understood how a panoramic receiver can be useful, let’s try to make one with a RTL-SDR dongle and a Raspberry Pi.
You will find instructions from Adafruit
I didn’t chose the TFT screen but connected the Rapsberry Pi to a monitor using the HDMI port.
The first step is to build the dongle drivers from here
You will need to blacklist the dvd_usb_rtl28xxu kernel module in /etc/modprobe.d/raspi-blacklist.conf to prevent Linux to use its own driver.
Then install gqrx.
It’s done: you have a nice spectrum scope which cost you $50.
Enjoy!
La suite à lire sur le site de : F5IYJ
VP8STI: 100W in a wire